Digital Diversified

Pay attention. Pay very close attention. If you blink, you’ll probably miss it.

The revolution is coming. Web 2.0 is even now in its glorious descent.

Witness the words of The Technology Prophet, he who shall forever be immortalized as “The Gates” (”The Bill” being already taken by a President):

The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

[The italics and the bold are mine.]

I’m joking. Mostly. Let it never be forgotten that much truth is spoken in jest.

It doesn’t even require much thinking. You have only to look, to see what comes.

The world is moving to a place of complete connectivity. “Convergence” is actually something of a misnomer, as the new technologies that will emerge will actually bear very little resemblance to what came before.

I’d dub the new age “Web 3.0″, but again - that would be doing the coming time a serious disservice. It really won’t have anything to do with the ‘Internet-as-we-know-it’ at all.

It is now officially too late for anyone who has somehow managed to get left behind. My advice for those who slipped through the cracks is to just let it go. All things come back around, if you wait long enough. The time for these emergent technologies that were dubbed the Internet, and then, Web 2.0, is near.

Already we see the drive for technology that is more people focused. Vonage even dubs itself the technology company where “Nerds need not apply”. In a very general sense, it could be said that “people friendly” was the point of the Web 2.0 surge. Many people believe this to be true. Except in the most general of ways, it is not.

The Internet, and even this new Web 2.0, was very much a case of “Revenge of the Nerds”. The intelligent found a medium where, for a very short time, they were able to assert dominance. They did so well that it became the “in” thing to do, attracting investors, and eventually, the dot-com crash of the later nineties.

The need for new blood (for the “non-nerdy”, “average” consumer) for the advertiser dollars led to a push for less elitist internet technology. Where once the coolest technologies reigned, cold hard economics took over, and it became very apparent that a push must be made for accessible technology, lest the internet suffocate under its own weight. Witness Web 2.0.

While the point of whether the PC or the Mac is more innately accessible/user-friendly could be argued into the dust (and has been, ad infinitum), it must be agreed that Bill Gates has always had a vision of convergence. And by convergence, I mean seamless technology. Technology that does not have to be accessed from a terminal dedicated to that purpose (ie, the computer), but which is so much a part of everyday life as to be unnoticeable.

A home where your TV talks to your kitchen. Where your refrigerator orders your groceries for you. Where your living room coffee table displays, well, whatever you want it to. (All of the proceeding technologies already exist, btw.) Bill’s personal home has even made the Guiness Book of World Records for the most “wired” home on the planet. From what I hear, even the window shades and the paintings on the wall are plugged into his personal Matrix.

Which brings us back to the point. TV will be the first, and most noticeable part of our lives, to go. On that point, I most definitely agree with The Gates. All I’m saying is, don’t expect it to end there. See it for what it really is, the tremor which precedes the Big One, the harbinger of so much more to come.

Internet to revolutionize TV in 5 years: Gates - Yahoo! News